Oracle Blog

Jolly Holiday With Mary

What is MaryMaryreally
like? To borrow from Mary Poppins, we spent a jolly holiday
with her.

She is the kind of person who will park her kids for
three hours to drive an hour on a day off, to sit in a local ice
rink and watch someone else's kid play hockey. The someone else would
be me, the day in question was President's Day, and at the time, she
was the most famous person at the Reston SkateQuest Olympic rink.

But no techno-celeb autograph signings for her. Just great cheering.
She cheers the way the writes: authentic, fun, concise.

But in true MaryMary style, we needed to make the Important Connections.
Think of them as the links in life that imitate a blog. So I introduced
Mary to one of our team parents, a figure skating coach who had just been
on his cell phone with one of his
skating friends from Russia. Now MaryMary knows someone who knows an
Olympic gold medalist.

When asked where her cheering accomplices had gone for the day,
Mary told us they were bowling. We warned her that precisely
that kind of "we're bored, let's do something different" activity
led us to be watching our fifth youth hockey game in less than 48 hours,
a 4-hour drive from home. My wife added that bowling doesn't seem
as all-encompassing as ice hockey, until you realize that my wife
(and I) went to high school with a fairly quiet, good-natured guy
who went bowling on his days off -- and turned into 29-time PBA Champion Parker Bohn.